Monday, April 14, 2008

Our second project for Character Design 1 was to redesign key characters from the story of Beowulf. We were supposed to base the designs on a particular historical culture, while modifying the motifs a little bit. I chose to base mine on the ancient Celts and worked that culture's ornamentation and design motifs into Beowulf's costume. I'm not sure if the resolution will be high enough to see, but the band across Beowulf's chest depicts various creatures and monsters he has defeated, among which is a Teletubby...

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

A couple of weeks ago, our Dynamic Sketching class went to the Military Vehicle Museum in El Monte, CA. I had no idea something so cool was so close. Greg, the proprieter of the musem, does all sorts of military vehicle work for films, both as a driver and as a consultant, and many items in his collection have appeared in major motion pictures. We got to walk around the collection, taking photos and sketching. He even let us crawl around inside an M60 tank. It was pretty sweet. Here are some sketches I did on site, from photos, and from a book on tanks that I picked up at Borders a while back.

As is often the case, part of our Dynamic Sketching assignment was to do redesigns of what we had drawn from observation. I explored several designs that could be built over a 1940's farming tractor. The premise is that US munitions factories have been destroyed by invading Nazis, and the army is forced to fit anything and everything with armor to defend American soil from the invasion.